Schools to Offer Free Classes Online

Twelve top universities Tuesday joined a venture that offers free Internet courses world-wide, in a bet by some of the most prestigious institutions globally on online education.

The schools agreed to join four others already working with Coursera, a for-profit company founded by two Stanford University computer-science professors. The schools will offer 111 mainly introductory courses this school year, including Galaxies and Cosmology, Equine Nutrition and Contraception: Choice, Cultures and Consequences.

"It gets us one step closer to where anyone in the world can have connection to the best universities and access to the best professors," said Andrew Ng, who co-founded Coursera with fellow professor Daphne Koller.

ENLARGE

Two University of Illinois freshmen share a computer on campus. The university is one of 12 joining the Coursera venture.
AP

Initially, the Coursera classes won't be offered for credit, though some schools might choose to award certificates for completion. Anyone with Internet access can register for a class.

In most cases, the courses consist of video recordings of lectures, which are paused about every 10 minutes for a quiz to measure understanding. Students have homework as well as midyear and final assessments, graded by their peers based on a rubric created by the professor. The courses also have online forums where students can chat.

The schools signing on include the California Institute of Technology; Duke University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and the University of Virginia—where the battle over launching online courses played a role in the ouster of President Teresa Sullivan.

Ms. Sullivan resigned last month under pressure from the school's board, which said she was too slow to embrace online learning. Her ouster prompted faculty and student protests, and she was later reinstated.

Also joining are the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

The University of Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania already offer courses through Coursera, mostly to non-U.S. students.

The universities develop the courses and Coursera provides the online platform. Neither party pays the other, but Coursera officials said they are seeking revenue streams to share with the schools. They are exploring selling corporate recruiters the names of students who excel in their coursework, for instance. Coursera has about $22 million in financing, from some of the schools involved and venture-capital firms.

Colleges have offered classes and degrees online for years, but few have done so without charging. Other players in the field of free online education include edX, a joint venture between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The founders of Coursera said they intend to keep classes free, but they said some universities might choose to charge a fee for a bolstered version of an online course that would earn students credit. Officials from the University of Washington have already said they plan to do so.

Dave Szatmary, vice provost of educational outreach at the University of Washington, said the decision to join Coursera allows the school to meet its "mission to provide broad access to a world-class institution." He said the faculty reaction to the school's participation has been "varied" but added the school would ensure that every course offered on Coursera would be "high quality and innovative."

Proponents say online education could expand access to students world-wide and eventually help drive down higher-education costs, if the effort takes off and more schools sign on to offer for-credit classes. They also say it could boost lackluster completion rates because online students learn at their own pace and aren't tied to specific course times at specific locations.

Critics worry online education waters down the classroom experience. Shanna Smith Jaggars, who studies online higher education as part of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College, said studies show that those taking courses online do no better than traditional students, and at the community-college level, online students are more inclined to drop out of classes. "These courses might be great for certain highly motivated students, but the typical student needs personal interaction and support and encouragement from the teacher," she said.

Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, a Washington-based advocacy group that represents university executives, praised the effort. "We are in an increasingly competitive global economy that requires a continual process of raising educational attainment to keep your job or get a better job and this is an important experiment that can help achieve those goals."

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